Okay, I just want to say I blame schools for Microsoft’s monopoly on personal computing. School sysadmins are always dazzled by the shiny looking gifts that Microsoft gives them, ensuring the next generation of Microsoft useds is ready.
Yes I really liked the “microsoft excel and spreadsheets” class everyone had to take for 1-2 whole years. The tools designed for us to learn basics within weeks and discover features naturally over time.
I mean imagine how many negative side effects on education there would be if we just spent one or two weeks learning KStars or Geogebra or Kalzium.
Don’t worry tho cause with microsoft backing openai I am sure every student will be given a set of chatgpt premium accounts to “help” them in their learning. Universities are already doing it en masse.
Schools could have used that time they were “teaching” the Office suite to give an introduction to unix, programming, and the basics of how the internet functions. I had to read and analyze Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Homer and memorize the names and formulas of 33 polyatomic ions. Computing education to the same depth should have been and should be required as it was required for the other subjects.
when i was in school in the late 90s it was all microsoft all the time. we had courses specifically on MicrosoftTM WordTM. that sort of indoctrination isn’t visible in the workplace until the people going through it are old enough to work.
I graduated in 2011, and same. My high school had a pretty janky mix of various Dell Inspiron towers, running mostly Windows XP but with a handful of Windows 2000 and ME machines that for some reason (prolly hardware too old) escaped their upgrades. We went through impressively comprehensive MS Office training and even Computer Tech classes (essentially an intro to an intro to computer science where we learned data concepts and built a PC).
A few years later, 90% of those machines had been scrapped, the mandatory courses were all gone and the kids all had cheap crappy Chromebooks. Now any tech courses are just electives and the students are expected to magically know how to use the software they’re required to use. (Because “they’re young, of course they know it!” Nevermind that they’ve only used iPads since birth).
Consequently, any class involving a computer, even if it’s just word processing for English essays and such, has the teacher taking time out of instruction to show the students how to use the stuff. Otherwise there are problems. It’s a sorry state of affairs and a lot more kids are getting left behind when it comes to tech. Google might be the worst thing happening to education now if it weren’t for the GOP.
i was a ta in uni in 2011-2015 and while ipad babies weren’t a thing yet we did definitely have to explain to some people what files were. as far as i understand from my contacts at the university it it’s way worse now.
The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.
This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they’ll typically open the file explorer, click on “recent files”, and ask me why their python script won’t open it, when the files are right there next to each other in “recent files”.
our lab computers ran novell netware, which definitely told me that microsoft wasn’t all there was. but yeah, it definitely conditioned an entire generation into only understanding windows.
To be fair, NetWare again was the product - microsoft didn’t have anything worthy of respect until much later (and I can’t remember if AD was any good in the early 2000s!)
NT4s Lanmanager was rubbish - NetWare was light years ahead as a directory service. I’d argue the institutions simply had the right tools for the job.
You are right about the hostile defaults / corpos getting into education to capture a generation, of course (and institutions want to be relevant to the market rather than to the principles or foundations, which is a shame)
A couple years ago I interned for computer support at an elementary school in NYC. Most students had Chromebooks and Gsuite, K-2nd grade had iPads. Teachers had Lenovo laptops with Windows 10 and Office365.
…and until very recently, the discount for m365 was pretty neat, I gather.
Huh, that’s interesting. I’m not aware of what my kids teachers have had to use for themselves (I think the highschool might be MS-based?), but the “client side” has always been in Gsuite for over a decade
Okay, I just want to say I blame schools for Microsoft’s monopoly on personal computing. School sysadmins are always dazzled by the shiny looking gifts that Microsoft gives them, ensuring the next generation of Microsoft useds is ready.
Yes I really liked the “microsoft excel and spreadsheets” class everyone had to take for 1-2 whole years. The tools designed for us to learn basics within weeks and discover features naturally over time.
I mean imagine how many negative side effects on education there would be if we just spent one or two weeks learning KStars or Geogebra or Kalzium.
Don’t worry tho cause with microsoft backing openai I am sure every student will be given a set of chatgpt premium accounts to “help” them in their learning. Universities are already doing it en masse.
You lose some you lose some.
Schools could have used that time they were “teaching” the Office suite to give an introduction to unix, programming, and the basics of how the internet functions. I had to read and analyze Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Homer and memorize the names and formulas of 33 polyatomic ions. Computing education to the same depth should have been and should be required as it was required for the other subjects.
Knowledge is power.
We understand a very small subset of what we use every day, and that can only be catastrophic.
Really?
They’re almost universally Chromebooks and the Google suite for schools these days…
yeah but that’s fairly recent.
when i was in school in the late 90s it was all microsoft all the time. we had courses specifically on MicrosoftTM WordTM. that sort of indoctrination isn’t visible in the workplace until the people going through it are old enough to work.
I graduated in 2011, and same. My high school had a pretty janky mix of various Dell Inspiron towers, running mostly Windows XP but with a handful of Windows 2000 and ME machines that for some reason (prolly hardware too old) escaped their upgrades. We went through impressively comprehensive MS Office training and even Computer Tech classes (essentially an intro to an intro to computer science where we learned data concepts and built a PC).
A few years later, 90% of those machines had been scrapped, the mandatory courses were all gone and the kids all had cheap crappy Chromebooks. Now any tech courses are just electives and the students are expected to magically know how to use the software they’re required to use. (Because “they’re young, of course they know it!” Nevermind that they’ve only used iPads since birth).
Consequently, any class involving a computer, even if it’s just word processing for English essays and such, has the teacher taking time out of instruction to show the students how to use the stuff. Otherwise there are problems. It’s a sorry state of affairs and a lot more kids are getting left behind when it comes to tech. Google might be the worst thing happening to education now if it weren’t for the GOP.
i was a ta in uni in 2011-2015 and while ipad babies weren’t a thing yet we did definitely have to explain to some people what files were. as far as i understand from my contacts at the university it it’s way worse now.
Ohhh, I can sign off on this.
The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.
This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they’ll typically open the file explorer, click on “recent files”, and ask me why their python script won’t open it, when the files are right there next to each other in “recent files”.
To be fair, that’s about all there was… Corels (?) WordPerfect was ass, for sure. Office 97 was freaking amazing.
Although, I was a product of the time as well.
I used Applix on Unix / Linux and it was fine.
sure, but computers are so much more than office suites.
I don’t believe you
/s
our lab computers ran novell netware, which definitely told me that microsoft wasn’t all there was. but yeah, it definitely conditioned an entire generation into only understanding windows.
To be fair, NetWare again was the product - microsoft didn’t have anything worthy of respect until much later (and I can’t remember if AD was any good in the early 2000s!)
NT4s Lanmanager was rubbish - NetWare was light years ahead as a directory service. I’d argue the institutions simply had the right tools for the job.
You are right about the hostile defaults / corpos getting into education to capture a generation, of course (and institutions want to be relevant to the market rather than to the principles or foundations, which is a shame)
K-12 use Google, University use Microsoft
A couple years ago I interned for computer support at an elementary school in NYC. Most students had Chromebooks and Gsuite, K-2nd grade had iPads. Teachers had Lenovo laptops with Windows 10 and Office365.
…and until very recently, the discount for m365 was pretty neat, I gather.
Huh, that’s interesting. I’m not aware of what my kids teachers have had to use for themselves (I think the highschool might be MS-based?), but the “client side” has always been in Gsuite for over a decade